Trainspotting - Movie Review Example

Renton, Spud, Sick Boy, Tommy and the violent Begbie were all friends, lived in Scotland and hated it. They hated the dull life of Scotland. The story of the film revolves around Renton and his attempts to give up the heroin-addiction and to come out of the negative influence of his friends Tommy, Spud, and Sick Boy. The story also follows Tommy, Spud, Sick Boy and Begbie; their stories are beautifully projected in the film and their characters have displayed different aspects of the contemporary society of Scotland.

It is said that Trainspotting is not a British film at all; rather, it is a Scottish film which strongly asserts uniqueness of Scotland and does not associate itself with the general tourist-version package of Scotland. The film establishes the fact that Scotland also has a distinctive and healthy school of cinema. Trainspotting can be considered as a milestone of a ‘new Scottish cinema,’ which is quite different from all the stereotype movies made in Scotland in the past. It denies the Tartary and kailyardism which was imposed by outside filmmakers and by embracing contemporary and urban Scotland; it has became a milestone of Scottish film industry.

Trainspotting: An evaluation The story of the movie is narrated by shifting narrators. . The alienation of Renton has been beautifully highlighted in the night-club sequence in Edinburgh when his friends were dancing and he was shown standing alone in a corner of a room. Renton has lost his sex drive due to his drug addiction which is returned in a vengeance and the days and memories of impotency and the days after that has been remarkably shown in the movie and Renton’s desperation, his lustful mind and his happiness after regaining potency make the audience laugh but at the same time raise serious notes.

The movie Trainspotting seems to lack a defined time frame which sometimes becomes confusing. For instance, the duration of fibula is not known, the duration of Renton’s stay in London is not clear, or the time taken by Tommy for his experiments with heroin and his death. The film has a couple of flashbacks and a couple of flash-forwards and it appears like different episodes of soap. The director of the film is basically a director of soap-serials which is quite visible in the movie. “Trainspotting also cuts across genres mixing realism with fantasy, offering the characters.

The redemption of material impoverishment through aesthetic transformation. The film depicts poverty realistically, but in a way that encompasses the possibility of escape as well as entrapment, and in exploiting the aesthetics of film draws ‘a kind of vitality from grinding poverty” (Smith). Scotland is considered a beautiful tourist spot of Britain which has a lot of scenic beauties but Trainspotting has failed to represent Scotland in an ostentatious way; on the contrary, it has been displayed in a banal manner.

The depiction of Scotland is quite dull and dark whereas London has been portrayed as bright, warm and colorful and it clearly highlights